I return

Hello all,

Yes, I've been away from this blog for a very long time. But I find myself having more science content that I want to talk about, so I figure it's time to revive the Dendritic Arbor.

(Originally, I tied this blog not to my main Gmail account, but a different one. This turned out to be really annoying because every time I signed in to Blogger, I got signed out of my email. This was a major disincentive to post, and since I didn't realize you could transfer blog ownership between accounts, I just posted less and less. But now everything is fixed. Hooray.)

Where am I now? Well, I'm between my sophomore and junior years at MIT, I've radically changed my social circle, and I've pledged a (coed) fraternity, Epsilon Theta. More relevantly, I've finally entered a lab where I'm doing productive work on an interesting project in an environment I like, after a couple of short and ill-fated other lab positions. I'm working in one of the wellsprings of synthetic biology, Tom Knight's lab, studying a very intriguing and not very well-known bacterium.

At the same time, I'm also trying to get more into DIY Bio -- cheap open source lab equipment, electrophoresis gels in drinking straws, that sort of thing. We'll see how this goes. I may or may not be too busy to ever get started on this, what with classes (those random annoying peripheral activities that colleges insist you participate in).

It's good to be back.